


Night in Her Veins, Life in Her Touch

by andwewillreturntostardust



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke, F/F, F/M, Hainofi, M/M, Natblida, Nightblood - Freeform, Skaifisa, Slow Burn Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Wanheda Clarke Griffin, We'll see just how slow of a burn it is, With A Twist, i think, wanheda
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 23:06:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14603715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andwewillreturntostardust/pseuds/andwewillreturntostardust
Summary: AU:Before Polaris was destroyed in 2054 and Becca escaped to Earth to become Bekka Pramheda, she left a couple of gifts with a friend—namely, the Chief Medical Officer of what was soon to become the Ark.76 years later, the twelve remaining stations are inundated with radiation from a series of solar storms at the same time that Abigail Griffin is pregnant with her daughter, Clarke. While the majority of the population is immune to the unusual levels of radiation, both Abby and her husband Jake exhibit symptoms of radiation sickness—a fact that, combined with prolonged pre- and postnatal exposure, put Clarke's health and potential longevity in jeopardy.Soon, the question becomes: how much is Abby willing to risk for a chance to save her newborn daughter from the effects of radiation? And what will her choice mean, not only for her daughter, but for the 100 who will be sent to the Ground eighteen years after Clarke's birth?





	Night in Her Veins, Life in Her Touch

She was so small.

 

Tough—that much was clear already—but so, so small. Her sweet little girl.

 

Clarke.

 

Abby’s stomach lurched.

 

Pressing the back of her hand to her mouth, Abby whirled away from her daughter’s bassinet, lunging for the sink. Crimson splattered steel as she spat out a mouthful of blood, her grip on the sides of the basin so harsh, her fingers blanched. Her body racked itself with coughs, and when blood stopped coming up, gastric acid followed it, searing her throat.

 

Abby zoned out as best she could, blanketing her mind in a calm born only of the knowledge that the moment would pass.

 

Once her body had expelled what it needed to, Abby’s head dropped beneath her shoulders in utter exhaustion. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply as she tried to regain her bearings. When she opened them again, the first thing she saw was the mess she’d made in the basin.

 

She eyed the splatter in bleary disgust.

 

A flick of the faucet had water pouring into the sink. Abby ducked her head to catch some of the stream, relishing the coolness of the spray on her cheeks. After a quick gargle, she spat out the contents of her mouth one last time before starting to hose down the sink.

 

_Life never slows down on the Ark_ , she mused, the thought as bitter as the taste of bile lingering on her tongue.

 

The past six months had been even harder than usual on the people of the twelve stations. The surface of the Sun was acting out, flaring up with solar storms every couple of weeks, and as a result, the Ark had been repeatedly doused in an excess of solar radiation. The stations were fitted with some modest protections against solar events like the ones they’d been experiencing, but the scale of the recent storms had overwhelmed them and there was little to nothing that the engineers could do about it.

 

The good news in all of the mayhem was that, thanks to natural selection and long-term exposure to orbit-level radiation, the majority of the Ark’s citizens could metabolize the extra radiation without too much of a strain on their bodies.

 

The bad news was that a sizable minority could not _._

 

In half a year, an approximate ten percent of the Ark’s population had been in and out of Medical with symptoms of radiation sickness. As luck would have it, Abby’s husband Jake had been among the first five patients to show symptoms. Thankfully, though, he’d recovered with little difficulty.

 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for everyone.

 

Among the ten percent of the Ark’s population that had fallen ill, one in five people had developed either acute or chronic radiation syndrome, known respectively as ARS and CRS.

 

To date, there had been twenty-one fatalities.

 

Abby had the misfortune of being among the one in five—and at the moment, she was focused on doing all she could to avoid becoming death number twenty-two. More importantly, though, she was trying to save her daughter from the same fate.

 

With that thought and a last, quick inspection of her baby girl, Abby returned to bed, thoroughly drained of energy. She’d given birth only six days prior, and between the delivery and the CRS, her body was running riot. If she was going to have a chance at a full recovery, she needed all the rest she could get.

 

Before she could drift asleep, though, the click of a latch turning announced a visitor to the nursery.

 

A man in a white coat and blue scrubs entered the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. His black hair was tinged with gray at the temples, and his brow was creased and worn with worry—an occupational hazard, Abby knew.

 

Seeing that his patient was still awake (albeit resting), the doctor smiled, his eyes warm with fondness.

 

“Hello, Abby-girl.”

 

Through her fatigue, Abby returned the smile.

 

“Eli.”

 

Dr. Elijah Cartwig was the Ark’s longest serving Chief Medical Officer and the grandfather of Abby’s best friend, Callie (or Cece, to those who knew her best). He’d known Abby since her infancy and, thanks to the close friendship between his son and Abby’s mother, he was all but a second father to the young woman. He’d tutored her in medicine from the age of seven, and under his mentorship, she had become the youngest qualified doctor in the history of the Ark.

 

As he approached her bed, Cartwig’s gaze slid past his protégée towards the still-glistening steel of the sink, a shrewd glint in his eyes.

 

“How are you holding up?” he asked. A hint of apology in his voice acknowledged the inanity of the question.

        

Abby raised her eyebrows and barked out a laugh, wincing at the roughness of the sound.

 

“I’ve seen better days,” she admitted.  

 

Cartwig nodded, grim-faced. “You and the other folks out there,” he agreed. Plopping himself down on the chair by Abby’s cot, Cartwig let out a long sigh, heavy with the weight of the lives in his care. “Not all of them are fighters like you, Abigail,” he confided. “We’re going to lose a few more before the sickness has run its course.”

 

Abby pursed her lips. She’d suspected as much, but it still hurt to hear it confirmed, and especially by Cartwig. He was the most stubborn person she’d ever met; for him to admit they’d lose more patients…things had to be bad.

 

“Eli…” Abby fretted her hands in her lap, eyeing the plastic bassinet. When she brought her focus back to her mentor, she wasn’t surprised by the dread she saw on his face; he’d always been too sharp to miss a beat. His expression almost stopped her from asking the question they both knew was coming, but the sheer violence of her need to know his answer won out.

 

“The people we’re going to lose…Is Clarke going to be one of them?”

 

Cartwig grimaced.

 

“I can’t give you a firm yes or no, Abigail,” the doctor confessed, dragging a hand over his face and staring, eyes unfocused, at the floor. “At this point, the only thing I can conclude is that she’s safe from ARS, assuming this calm holds and the storms have finally stopped.” He sighed. “We don’t have the equipment to rule out CRS, so we’ll have to wait and see if she shows symptoms like we did with the others.” Cartwig’s expression was bleak. “But then, because she’s so young, there’s the added danger of—”

 

“Damage to her genome.” Abby nodded, licking her lips in an attempt to return some of the moisture to her mouth. “Long term effects. Thyroid cancer, brain cancer, leukemia…” she trailed off. “ _Damn it!_ ”

 

All strength seemed to leave Abby’s body; she slumped back against her bed, defeated.

 

After a moment’s hesitation, Cartwig reached out and took her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.  

 

“I’ll do everything I can, Abby-girl,” he promised, voice low. “If we’re lucky, and it’s within my power to help her, I will. I promise.”

 

At his words, Abby closed her eyes, fending off the urge to cry. She lifted her free hand and laid it on his forearm.

 

“I know you will,” she murmured. “I know.”

 

A tired, mournful silence fell over them, and wanting nothing more than to escape the unpleasantness of reality, Abby finally let her eyelids succumb to gravity’s pull. Comforted by Cartwig’s presence, she left her hand in his even as she drifted off to sleep.

 

*

 

Once he was confident he wouldn’t wake her, Eli slid his fingers from Abby’s lax grip and laid her hand on the bedspread over her lap. With a weary sigh, he smoothed the hair back from her brow, wiping sweat from clammy skin as his gaze darted over her features, checking her symptoms.

 

Abby’s resilience was remarkable, he marveled. That the combination of childbirth and CRS hadn’t managed to take her down was nothing short of a miracle—but then, that was Abigail. The girl had always been a force to be reckoned with.

 

Groaning quietly as his joints creaked, Eli leaned over to give Abigail a quick peck on the forehead. Then, with a final glance at mother and child, the doctor stood and left the peace of the nursery, shutting the door quietly behind him.

 

On a whim, Eli made his way through the observation ward, his attention flicking from one bed to the next as he travelled. For better or worse, there had been no visible changes to any of his patients’ conditions during the time he’d spent with Abby. All but a pair of them were resting in their cots; the exceptions were fixed to a game of two-handed euchre. One—Miller, he remembered, from the guard detail—waved distractedly at the doctor as he passed by.

 

Once he’d made a full circuit of the ward, rinsed, and de-scrubbed, Eli retired to his office for the night, where a bed of his own was waiting. Recently, he’d taken to holing up there instead of returning to his unit in light of the deterioration of many of his patients’ conditions. He hadn’t slept any worse for it; in fact, despite the stiffness of the cot he’d been using, Eli slept longer and harder in his office than he did on the rare nights he returned to his unit, during which he was plagued with something he could only describe as separation anxiety.

 

Tonight, though, the doctor doubted he’d get much sleep at all, regardless of where he went to obtain it.

 

Tonight, his thoughts were in turmoil.

 

Ever since Eli had found out that Abby and Jake were vulnerable in some degree to the radiation sickness, he’d been scared for little Clarke—hell, he’d been worrying about her before she’d even been given her name. Abby’s question tonight had brought that worry to the forefront, though, and the face she’d made when he’d given his answer was now etched on the underside of his eyelids.

 

Eli grimaced. No, the doctor thought darkly—he would not be sleeping tonight.

 

To complicate matters, it wasn’t only fear for Abby and her daughter that was keeping Eli up, though his other quandary was certainly linked to them.

 

For weeks now, a conversation Eli had had with the previous Chief of Medical had been playing on repeat in the back of his mind. Day and night, he was tormented by it, so preoccupied by the exchange that he sometimes dreamt of it, recalling Dr. Mallory’s face as though he’d spoken to her yesterday and not 30 years prior.

 

Eli thought of their conversation again now, and as he did, he sat on the edge of his cot, turning an object over in his hands. The item in question was a metal plaque the size of a dog tag, plain and assuming. Engraved on its surface was the following sequence:

 

**843 66784 7827**

 

The doctor ran his thumb over the grooves, frowning deeply. He had a choice to make, he knew. And if things went the way he feared, he would have to make it soon.


End file.
